Microsoft's VP of cloud Scott Guthrie yesterday announced Azure Backup Services had moved to general availability. The Azure service is primarily for Windows Server and should make it easier for enterprise customers to move files and folders to Azure with some assuredness now that it's backed by a Microsoft Support enterprise SLA.

Dovetailing with the new backup service, Microsoft announced a new Azure replication service called Hyper-V Recovery Manager is now available in public preview, which helps customers replicate critical services between a customer's own private clouds using System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

Application data stays in the private cloud while metadata such as names of logical clouds and virtual machines are sent to Azure for orchestration.

The Azure SDK 2.2 was also released yesterday and is, according to Guthrie, a "massive update". It includes among other things:

Visual Studio 2013 Support

Integrated Windows Azure Sign-In support within Visual Studio

Remote Debugging Cloud Services with Visual Studio

Firewall Management support within Visual Studio for SQL Databases

Visual Studio 2013 RTM VM Images for MSDN Subscribers

Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET

Updated Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets and ScriptCenter

Users can now also delete attached disks and virtual machine instances in a single operation in Azure. Previously deleting the VM was a manual task that needed to be done via a storage account. It's also possible to delete a cloud service, its deployments, and its role instances in a single action.

Guthrie also noted a few enhancements to previously released Azure Active Directory services in preview such as its single sign-on support for a variety of SaaS applications. Guthrie said price and general availability will be "by the end of the year".

Liam Tung is an Australian business technology journalist living a few too many Swedish miles north of Stockholm for his liking. He gained a bachelors degree in economics and arts (cultural studies) at Sydney's Macquarie University, but hacked (without Norse or malicious code for that matter) his way into a career as an enterprise tech, s...
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